Spotify to get web app

Our favourite music service, Spotify, is about to get more . . . favouriter. The folks at Spotify are said to be working on a web-based version of their service, that would eliminate the need to install a clunking great app on your friend’s PCs whenever you want to play them a track or two.

Whether you’ll still have to install that clunking great app on your own PC is unclear, however. The web-based version of the Spotify service might just have a subset of functionality – meaning you’ll still need the app-based version from time to time – or it might be the whole kit and kaboodle, according to the report on TechCrunch.

If you haven’t signed up for it, Spotify is a streaming and download music service that uses social media (chiefly Facebook) to help you discover new songs. It’s main brilliance, though, is that it’s cheap, ranging in price from free to $11.99 a month for its premium service, and yet has an absolute bucketload of songs. Pretty well any obscure track we’ve ever looked for on Spotify, we’ve found in a jiffy.

Of course, as fans of Sonos music hardware, we’ve done most of our Spotify searching on our Sonos systems. Either that, or on our mobile phones – Spotify has good apps on Android, iOS and Windows Phone. But from time to time we do fire up the Windows app, and it’s at those times we’ve wished there was a simpler way to do it. Enter the putative web-based app, a perfect way to take your music to your friend’s house and, in the process, win Spotify some new customers.

The web app might also have a better music discovery service, that same TechCruch report says. Spotify already lets you sign up to other users’ playlists, and it already allows you to receive Facebook notifications about what Spotify tracks your Facebook friends are playing, but it doesn’t do much by way of introducing you to expert music listeners so you can ape their tastes.

“Spotify will likely offer some sort of suggested user list of who to follow, and may try to recruit big name celebrities, musicians and DJs to share playlists," the TechCruch report says.

Speaking of Facebook, one of the worst things about Spotify has been that it has had a stupid, stupid rule that you have to be a member of Facebook before you can sign up for Spotify. Too bad if you’re one of the growing number of people who hate Facebook.

One way around the stupidity has been to use the German version of Spotify to create your account.

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For some reason doubtlessly related to the high levels of common sense in that country, Germans have been able to use Spotify without Facebook for ages.

Well, it appears that common sense is contagious.

If you look at the bottom of the Australian sign up page for Spotify, you’ll now see a link saying, “Create an account using my e-mail address."

This link, as far as I can tell, is brand new, and as far as I can tell it puts an end to the Facebook stupidity, hopefully once and for all.

Having had its thunder well and truly stolen by mysterious leaks, Nokia boss Stephen Elop and Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer took to the stage last week to show off the second-worst-kept secrets in the phone industry: the Lumia 920 and Lumia 820 smartphones.

(The worst kept secret was that Apple will be launching the iPhone 5 on September 12, giving Nokia just a week of clear air before the craziness begins.)

The phones run the latest version of Microsoft’s excellent phone software, Windows Phone 8, which pundits say has a real chance of knocking BlackBerry of its teetering perch as the software of choice for large enterprises.

As leaked, the flagship Lumia 920 will sport wireless charging and a PureView camera, and as leaked the PureView camera will sport somewhat fewer megapixels than the 41 that were found on Nokia’s previous PureView phone. Indeed, at just 8.7 megapixels, it’s 32 megapixels shy of the previous effort, but Nokia has promised that it will still take best-of-class photos, thanks in part to a “floating" lens that will reduce camera wobble. We will, of course, review that feature when the phone actually comes out (Nokia is a little vague on that point), having quaffed three or four cups of coffee in preparation.

The Lumia 920 will also have an improved 4.5-inch screen, known as a PureMotion HD+ display, that Nokia says can be viewed in the bright sunlight of a desert. The “HD+" indicates that the screen will have a resolution of 768 x 1280 pixels, a huge improvement over the previous Lumias which, due to limits imposed by Microsoft, were sadly lacking in the resolution department.

Other Microsoft limits have been removed, too. The Lumia 920 now has a dual-core 1.5 GHz processor which, while not exactly the fastest thing on the planet, at least gets Nokia into the same ball park as most other smartphone makers. And it’s worth pointing out that Windows Phone 8 is a very efficient little operating system – it actually ran pretty smoothly on the slower processors anyway – so we’re hopeful that the Lumia 920 will turn out to be something of a speed demon, even up against quad-core phones.

Unlike the Windows 8 phone Samsung recently announced, it looks like the Lumia 920 will not have a microSD card slot, however.

Overseas, Nokia is getting wireless charging docks into cafes and airports. Being able to charge your phone just by sitting it on your table would be a neat trick.

You’ll also be able to charge it just by sitting it on top of speakers, as per the photo below.